Guest speakers: Divya Dwivedi (philosopher, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) and Ivana Perica (literary scholar, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin)
Pinni B4116, Tuesday October 8th, 2024, 10:00-12:00
Welcome to “Openings”, a kick-off seminar of the Academy Research Project “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989” (PI Natalya Bekhta). Through a series of short presentations and a discussion with guests Divya Dwivedi (philosopher, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) and Ivana Perica (literary scholar, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin) we will consider the usefulness of a non-substantive approach to Utopia for an understanding of the current aesthetic and political concerns. Contemporary Eastern European literature, in the global comparative context of ‘world literature’, will offer us an entry point but the discussion will not be limited by this angle nor by any narrow disciplinary focus.
Utopia today has largely transformed from content-based, substantive visions of ideal space into more subtle traces of future-oriented desire for a better time. In this shape Utopia persists today, including in the war-torn Eastern Europe, and it is not an anomaly but a new example of what Miguel Abensour (2018) described as a revival of the Utopian impulse—an impulse “toward freedom and justice,” which is continuously “reborn in history, reappears, makes itself felt in the blackest catastrophe, resists as if catastrophe itself called forth new summations.” The rebirth of Utopia can also be translated as a rebirth of History itself in the past two decades, to use a phrase from Alain Badiou. Thus, the 21st-century upsurge in “historical riots,” such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Ukrainian Maidans, Black Lives Matter or Mouvement des gilets jaunes, may signal “the emergence of a capacity, at once destructive and creative, whose aim is to make a genuine exit from the established order.” In short, Utopia as a desire, impulse and capacity – rather than concrete content and visions of ideal societies.
The problem of how to make a genuine exit from the established order, from the status quo of international politics, away from attempts to conduct business as usual on a burning planet is essentially a demand for a Utopian opening towards something better but as yet unimaginable. If the status quo “traps human beings into forgetting the very possibility that they could be other than what they were born as” (Dwivedi and Mohan 2024, 35), then a way out of such closure offers a way to anastasis, a revolutionary principle that Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan describe as coming into being of a new comprehending law that allows to grasp the existence of other possibilities. Art, and literature in particular, seems to offer itself as the social artefact most readily available for an investigation of the problem of Utopian openings. At the same time, literary discourse – however progressive and iconoclastic it may (want to) be – is inevitably implicated in the literary system and the social order currently governed by the exploitative logic of capital (Ivana Perica 2024). How do we navigate the politically pressing and hermeneutically problematic topic of Utopia?
Further reading
Abensour, Miguel. 2008 [2006]. “Persistent Utopia,” Constellations 15, no. 3: 406–42.
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Verso.
Perica, Ivana. 2024. “Competitive Words: Identity Counts in Large Amounts.” Genealogy+Critique 10, no. 1: 1–22.
Dwivedi, Divya and Shaj Mohan. 2024. Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution. Ed. Maël Montévil. Hurst Publishers.
Contact: Natalya Bekhta